Softlaunch of buddhalists, not just another todo list app.

I'm not thrilled about the name.

First, it seems pretty disrespectful to use religious imagery, etc., for a commercial product, especially if you are not a practitioner of said religion. This is doubly worrisome by the text that seems to suggest that "zen" (or, rather, Zen) and "Buddhism" are interchangeable concepts. They're not.

Second, if you are a practitioner, you're undoubtedly aware of the large role that lists play in Buddhism-- which means that it's a bit deceptive to have a product named "Buddhalists" (or Buddalists-- see below) and not have the product based on the traditional Buddhist conception of lists.

Third: you don't even get the spelling straight on your own headline. That's scary.

From a design point of view (I'm a designer), I think you went overboard. When I am working I don't want anything getting in the way between me and the list items.

In your analysis of your competitors, for Workflowy you said that it's confusing to have many nested lists (I'm paraphrasing here), but the thing is—I find WorkFlowy way more logical than your service. The nesting is a visual guide for the user, letting them know where they are within the tree.

At first I couldn't figure our how to check items off, but then I noticed the little tiny “x” to the right, dangerously close to the “>>”. Feel free to beef that one up, and space these two out. Also, apparently I can't check off the last item in the list? That's strange, but it might be a bug.

Lastly, I love the help overlay, nice!

hmm...back blaze charges 5 dollars a month to back up my computer with unlimited storage. you're charging 10 dollars a month for unlimited nested strings.

the computer says..........no.

silliness aside, maybe try a forum for busy execs. Might get better input & target customers.

Proud to announce the (soft) launch of http://buddhalists.com/, my first foray into paid SaaS web apps. Please read on before tossing this out as “yet another todo list app”.

http://buddhalists.com/ http://buddhalists.com/demo/ http://buddhalists.com/signup/

But first the story. I create web apps I would use, mainly so I can use them. I find myself taking lists for all sorts of things, and wishing I could digitize them somehow. http://buddhalists.com/ is the solution for me. I sampled every list app in the app store (a good $60 worth) and found that they were

1. mostly focused on todo lists

2. either too simple (think one page list) or too complex (think color coded tags with autosort built in)

3. Always limited to either managing one list, or several flat lists. I was hoping for recursion.

This is what http://buddhalists.com/ brings to the table. Simple unconstraining lists with nice design, no rules, and infinite recursion. For more explanation, see the demo. For a more detailed breakdown as to why other list taking solutions were non ideal, see http://pastebin.com/QVynrfkC.

As far as tech goes, mongodb with nodejs backend, spine.js powered javascript heavy UI. Stripe for payments.

I like the simplicity of this. Like headsclouds, I couldn't figure out at first how to make "sub" items. Due to old habits, I kept trying to hit "tab" to indent a new item.

Now for the hard part. In a previous career, I used to spend a lot of time with marketers. They always used to talk about "share of wallet" and the phrase stuck with me. In short: Unless someone is loose with their cash, there's a limited amount of money they're going to want to spend on online subscriptions (of any kind). Given that your app is actually more expensive than a month of Netflix or Amazon Prime, how do you justify the price?

Note: I'm not saying you need to lower your price, just that you need to be more explicit about the value proposition. Especially because stuff like Tadalist and Workflowy are free or freemium offerings.

How do you want to compete with Evernote?

It's available as a web app, native apps for iOS, MacOS, Windows (all my platforms, also Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry), and it works great on all platforms. It syncs so I have native access everywhere. It supports some minimal formatting, but doesn't get in the way. It works great for managing multiple notes, kind of like an Inbox. Notes are private be default, but I can share them with people or make them public.

Oh, and Evernote is free.

So, what problem are you solving for $10 that Evernote doesn't solve much better for free?

Also, Evernote has $95M funding, so their velocity is probably 100x yours.

PS: This is a harsh comment, but the intention is constructive. If you don't have good answers to these questions, then it's back to the drawing board!

Works quite nicely, I like it. One small suggestion -- if I push right inside the text box, and I've just come from pushing left, then go back to that item. For example, say I'm looking at the shopping list in your demo. I'm on "get veggies". I want to add tomato, but I can't remember if I had a "get fruits" category. So I push left, glance down, see that I don't and decide to put tomato into veggies anyway. Then I push right and nothing happens. Instead, where possible, right should move me back, so I can go left-right and be back where I started. Bonus points for left-left-left-right-right-right working :)

This is in no way a criticism of the actual app, but has building a to-do list become our day's "writing your own text editor"? Fascinating how a new one seems to pop up every day.

I think 10$ for an obvious weekend hack is quite a lot.

Apart from having a name and style that tries to invoke 'zenlike' feelings, what does the app actually do that makes it stand out? There are 1000+1 todo apps, many of which focussing on the 'less is more' principle. I don't see how this app is different, apart from charging a really soothing $10 per month....

Putting name and price aside I don't like deep nesting approach for lists. I tend to have too many levels and it's cumbersome to click so many times. I like to have an option to see all my tasks at same level and get nice overview of everything I want to do.

(1) you've spelled the product name two different ways in the first 3 lines.

(2) why would I pay $10/month for this when checkvist does this and more for $0/month?

(3) the help overlay is nice.

(4) interaction on lists not intuitive.

Nice app and all, but I don't see myself paying $10 for something I could easily replicate in a day. Not trying to be mean or anything, but perhaps I'm not the target market here.

seems like an excessively designed analog of http://workflowy.com/, which is awesome and simple, and arguably more Zen

Would I be far off the mark if I thought this is something like org-mode without the Emacs? (And yes, you should get the title right.)

My 2 cents : Google Tasks blows this out of the water.

nice that you are using spine - it is a great little framework